Learning from past mistakes

I tend to be hard on myself.  Especially as an instructor I expect myself to always be at 100%.

This semester I have 2 different sections of the same face to face class.  I prefer to teach the same material to both classes.  That way, they have quizzes at the same time and the overall class schedule is easier for me to manage.

However, when 1 section has a day off for a holiday and the other doesn't, this is tricky.  When this happened last semester I had 2 sections on Monday/Wednesday and my Honors section on Tuesday/Thursday.  When my "regular" classes had Labor Day off I made the class my Honors section had on that week a "fun" class.  I asked them what they wanted to discuss.  A student suggested the topic of Mexico City's issue of sinking.  We discussed that issue and possible solutions as well as the tomato festival in Buñol, Spain.  It was a great class.

I chose not to go that direction this semester with my "regular" class that met on Tuesday when my other "regular" class had Monday off for MLK Day.  This semester I took what we were going to go over in the classes before and after the holiday and I spread them over 3 classes.  I also had time to have a class discussion the tomato festival with our peach festival in our town every summer.

Hooray!  It was a good solution to the challenge of having an extra day.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Discussing AI usage with students

Today in class we wrapped up Ch 1.  Ch 1 Quiz is later this week. I have found that many students have test anxiety.  I have weekly announcements I send out to my beginning classes that give study tips.  Hopefully this helps them feel more prepared as we go into quizzes and tests.  This point of the class is a natural time to discuss ethical usage of AI. Today we discussed ethical usage of AI with Spanish.  It was a great discussion.   A student pointed out it's helpful to use AI to make practice material to study.  This was new for me. I give them a chapter 1 summary that has everything on it.  In my mind, use that to study the material.  Make flash cards.  Practice them. I'm unsure how an AI can improve upon that, but if a student has found a way to learn the material, fantastic.
Read more

Amazing OER materials

As I'm building my Spanish conversation class, I'm thrilled that our librarian helped me find an amazing resource.  It's videos of Native-Spanish speakers telling about specific topics:  numbers, food, colors, etc.  The videos are very short and easy for beginning students to understand. They also already have CC in English and Spanish.  This resource is fantastic.   Hooray for wonderful OER resources!
Read more

Receiving feedback

 I'm in the process of creating my 5th class using OER materials.  Whew.  That's a lot. This time around, I'm creating a class I haven't taught before.  When I redesigned my 1411 class I had already taught it numerous times with 2 different curricula, both excellent.  I knew what the class should feel like.  I switched over to using different materials, but it wasn't really new to me.  The same was true for the other 3 classes I redesigned. This time around I'm creating a conversation class.  I'm at the point now where I have the scope and sequence complete and each chapter has a summary of the vocab we'll be studying.  I'm now building out the drill assignments.   When I build assignments I like to label them as "drill" or "apply."  With a drill assignment, students know they are practicing the information at a very basic comprehension level.   Today I wrote a drill assignment and just wasn't sure if it was good....
Read more